STORY ARCHIVE

Robo Chick

How do you pry into the mind of a freshly hatched chick? You use a robot of course!

While most birds learn the lessons of life directly from their parents, the Australian Brush Turkey never gets to meet mum and dad. So how does it learn how to be a good brush turkey when it grows up? That's the question that has driven Ann Goth to conduct a neat set of experiments aimed at figuring out how brush turkeys learn. And her major ally in this quest is a small robot dressed in turkey feathers.

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: This may be the strangest piece of scientific equipment you have ever seen.

It's a robotic brush turkey chick and it's pecking away at the cutting edge of research into the behaviour of these mysterious birds.

Ann Goth built Robo chick to tap into turkey communication because she wanted to learn more about these odd creatures.

Dr Ann Goth: I was just so fascinated when I found my first chick buried in the soil in more than a metre's depth and I realised there is nothing known about these chicks, or very little, and I just thought this was a great study topic.

Narration: The male Australian Brush Turkey scrapes together a huge mound of rotting leaf litter.

Along comes a female and lays a single egg in the mound.

And that's about it. Neither mum or dad stick around to look after the kids.

Dr Ann Goth: They don't have their parents as role models or any siblings so they hatch without any parents to learn from.

Narration: This bush orphan not only doesn't get to meet it's parents, it won't even meet it's siblings because they hatch out, one at a time, and scurry off into the bush alone.

So how do Brush Turkeys learn how to be come a Brush Turkey? How do they recognise friend from foe?

To find out Ann has teamed up with Associate Professor Chris Evans. He's head of the animal behaviour laboratory at Macquarie University.

And together they hatched the idea of using robots.

Dr Chris Evans: We needed something that was highly realistic that would if you like fool the brush turkey, but that we could define the behaviour of so that we could peck or scan or whatever else. And of course it's not possible with live chicks.

Narration: Now with their mechanical deception ready for action, they needed to find their turkey...a naïve, young chick who'd talk turkey to the robot. And young is what Ann needed...very young...she needed to find an egg!

Paul Willis, reporter: So this is a Brush Turkey Mound?

Dr Ann Goth: Yes, this is a turkey mound...

Narration: This enormous compost heap incubates the large turkey eggs

Dr Ann Goth: The female actually digs the hole, the male doesn't help at all.

Paul Willis, reporter: So let me get this right, the male does all the hard work of building the mound in the first place and then the female comes along and rearranges the place to her own liking!

Dr Ann Goth: Yes, well kind of But she still does other things, she produces a big large egg and that's a lot of hard work too.

In November last year the fire brigade at Burleigh Heads had to dig out an unfortunate man who had fallen into an open mound only to be buried alive by an overly amorous male turkey!

Dr Ann Goth: Paul I got one.

Narration: From this egg will hatch another chick for Ann's experiments with Robo chick.

Back at the lab, Ann checks the eggs using a strong light to figure out just how far from hatching they are.

Dr Ann Goth: This one still has about 45 days to hatching.

Narration: They're then placed in incubators set at 34 degrees Celsius until they hatch.

Meanwhile, robo chick is prepared for action.

Paul Willis, reporter: It's a real chicken!

Dr Ann Goth: It's the skin of a real chick that has died naturally and inside we have this servo motor for remote control cars.

Paul Willis, reporter: And what does that allow it to do?

Dr Ann Goth: It has this little arm that moves the bird as though it was pecking at the ground.

Narration: After 45 days in the incubator this little fella has only just hatched. And the first bird it will ever meet will be Robo Chick.

Narration: Turkey testing is conducted in an open-air aviary.

Dr Ann Goth: Here in the testing aviary, I've set up in each choice arms a chick, here we have a robo chick that doesn't move and over here we have a robo chick that pecks at the ground.

Paul Willis, reporter: So that's kind of control robo chick?

Dr Ann Goth: Yes, that's right...

Paul Willis, reporter: Where does the test chick go?

Dr Ann Goth: Well the test chick goes here under this brush and from there it can come out and from there it can make a choice as to where it wants to go.

Paul Willis, reporter: Well I'd better let you get on with it, I'll see you in the hide.

Narration: The chick is set in place and the moment of truth arrives.

How will the real turkey react to the fake?

Paul Willis, reporter: Doesn't appear to be doing much?

Dr Ann Goth: No it's very quiet...

Paul Willis, reporter: May be it's his first time on telly. Oh, there he goes!

Dr Ann Goth: oh yeah.

Narration: ... and it looks like there's something about the pecking Robo Chick that tells the real turkey he's found a friend.

Paul Willis, reporter: So he seems to be attracted to the one doing the pecking?Dr Ann Goth: Yeah.

Narration: Maybe seeing another, similar sized bird pecking at the ground tells the chick that there is food there.

But maybe there's more to recognising a friend than just pecking. After all, lots of birds peck at the ground and some of them would love a turkey chick snack if it just walked up to them.

So Ann decided to widen her investigations.

Dr Ann Goth: We thought that colour may also be a specific cue that chicks used to identify each other. It means these colours need to be present for chicks to recognize members of the other species.

Narration: Ann came up with an ingenious technique to figure out the colours of a turkey's world.

Dr Ann Goth: We used filters that we mounted above the robot that filtered out certain wave lengths of the ambient light either UV, short wave, medium or long wave light.

Narration: What they found was that when they removed the medium and long wave light (the reds and yellows), the chicks were still attracted to Robo-Chick.

But when they remove UV and short wave light invisible to the human eye, the chick shows less interest in the mechanical turkey.

Dr Ann Goth: You see the chick does not seem to be as attracted to it the chicks view of the robo chick is different from ours because they can see in the UV and we can't.

NarrationUnder a UV light, the beak and claws of Robo chick glow, a feature other brush turkeys see all the time.

Apparently, brush turkey chicks know these glowing patches are the sign of a friend.

It's still early days for the research and Ann is only just starting to talk turkey.

And, at the end of the experiment, our naïve little chick is returned to the wild. He's a little older and lot wiser for having met his first brush turkey...even if it was just a toy in turkey feathers.